Liberty and Freedom doesn't mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to pay for your habits.
So what consitutes this? Where do you draw the line? The problem is that when you start blocking sites, where do you stop? Back in high school (early days of filtering) I had to do a report on Free Speech. I hopped on the net and found a site that looked promising, only to find it had been blocked. It wasn't about porn (it had a link to porn or something) but about the first amendment!
Once you start filtering stuff, how can you really tell what it is that needs filtering? While some kid may be "drooling over the latest Porn Pics", another may be looking up neo-nazi pages for a report on racism. Are you going to tell him he can't look at these sites because they're offensive? Once you start labeling things like this, you get in to a very grey area that really does infringe, not only on free speech, but on the ability of a school or library to do its job effectively.
I agree on this one. It's next to impossible to find a lot of the CD's I look for used, simply because people aren't willing to part with them because they're not just throw-aways. The problem with all the authors who complain is that they sold a lot of books that weren't necessarily keepers to a lot of people who don't care much in the first place. The more you sell, the more likely a copy will end up on the used racks. And they sold a ton.
This whole thing reminds me of when GNOME came out. All we heard was bitching and whining all around about how it sucked and was buggy, and now that it's a stable project no one seems to have any real problems with it.
I think the same thing will happen with Mozilla. You've got the core supporters (try a nightly! Or v 0.6!) and the bashers (slow, bloated, sucky) but in the end, when it's released, you'll see a lot of people using it happily with no complaints. We bitch because we're seeing a work in progress and comparing it to a fifth generation product but when we get the final product I think we'll be quite content with it. It'll render fast enough and start fast enough and we really won't care in the end because we'll have a good, modern browser. The bitching is just temporary.
I think there is the distinct possibility that other countries will outlaw zoning, but that doesn't mean that the US will be the same, regardless of what those other countries do. DVDs and players produced in the US will continue to be zoned, and I'm betting most of the DVD's produced in other countries will be zoned as well, just to squeeze the US consumers more, even if the players themselves play from anywhere.
I'd love to see zoning go away in the US, where it needs to go away most (the home market is the most important market of all) but I just don't think it will. People just don't see how it hurts them because most people aren't even aware that zoning exists.
I dunno... this doesn't mean it'll get passed everywhere. You can bet the movie industry isn't just going to stand by, especially in America where they have serious lobbying power. Sure... we could all order our DVD players from Australia, but Joe "Circuit City" America isn't going to even think about it.
And one of the big ones to think about is the PS2, which I'm betting is going to be the DVD player in most homes all over the globe. They've already got region encoding, and they'll continue to do so in most places. The DVD format isn't going to change, so most people will have their regional encoding nicely in place for the MPAA.
Personally, I'd love to see regional encoding dropped for all future stuff, but somehow, I don't think it'll happen in my backyard. This country is too well run by the rich to change that one.
I hate Mandrake. Don't get me wrong, it weaned me in to the Linux world, but it's too huge. It's exactly what I don't want in a distro. Why not just have a sort of "mock windows" install? Install a desktop environment, and all the necessary apps that a user would need:
Web Browser
Word Processor/Office Suite
Email Client
Games!
etc, etc
But only one of each! The thing about Mandrake is that it's the Kitchen Sink approach. How the hell is any newbie supposed to figure out the differences between programs if (s)he can't even find the documentation because it's buried under a heaping pile of obscure apps? The other thing that's needed is a sort of pseudo-dselect (for Debian users out there) that will allow you to select a new app (categorized by type) whenever you want one, and will let you either download the app or install from a CD. Easy and not too complex. It's best not to overwhelm a new user, but to give him a leg up in to the world with a few defaults. If he wants to explore, let him, but don't throw it all out there and expect him to wade through it. You'll just bury them.
Thank you for this, you really hit it right on the head, in probably the best phrased and most interesting comment I've seen on the subject anywhere.
I think one of the problems is that the paranoia is so hard to penetrate. How do you get through to someone that it's Ok to be a sexual creature? That it's acceptable to have desires and wants? To make it harder... how do you get through to them if they live in Wyoming and you're in California? Porno sure won't do it... it's too absurd to actually present a message. Hollywood hasn't done it, even when characters are honestly sexual in films, it's often labeled as smut. The call "for the children" isn't really a call for the children at all, but for the immature child who lives inside everyone who's scared of their body who never left mental puberty and grew in to themselves. How can you reach a person like that?
I'm really hoping the next sexual revolution comes along soon, because we could use it. From what I understand, the first was in the 20's and it liberated women (sexually at least) then the second was in the 60's (and still continues somewhat) with gays and women. What needs to happen next is a male liberation that doesn't exclude heterosexuals. Or perhaps a stronger women's lib movement that really hits the people who need it. But it's fear of ourselves that puts laws like this out there, and you're definitely right... it's a social form of mental illness.
So what do we do? Standardize on one thing? A possibility... given that we've standardized on GNU for the most part (BSD folks aside) and the traditional UNIX interface in general, as well as X, so it's not like we can't all rally behind some basics.
But how do you make the unified component library. As near as I can tell, the only one out there is for GNOME, and I really really really don't want to go back to running that thing again. I'm perfectly happy with my minimalist Blackbox, thank you.:-) So... if we separate the Gnome component library stuff (and bonobo... I really want bonobo...) from all the extra ties, could we make the kind of development environment we need? I think so.
But, in the end, what makes this OS great is the heterogeneity of it, that it doesn't all come from the Big Guys at Apple or MS. I really don't want Steve Jobs directing my computing experience any more, and I won't have it. I know I'm not the only one, and that's why there's so little unification, and it's also why the Linux Community (yes, caps;-) feels so alive! It's what's drawing the attention of journalists and IBM and everyone who cares to take a look. It's like we're holding some secret, that the computer isn't just a productivity tool that's made for stock options and.coms and dividends, but a fun machine that can be "hacked" or programmed without a $500 compiler. The fire in the community is there because it is open, and because it's open there's diversity, and that's why linux has some of the best stuff out there.
br
That said, I think there should be some guidelines set up for certain things... like UI. Set up the equivalent of Mac UI Guidlines, so that all programs look similar and work similar, whether written for KDE, GNOME, or anything else. If someone doesn't follow the guidelines, then patch it for them so it does and send it on in. That's Free Software. Modify. Distribute. Problem solved. I think we'll have to pretty much standardize on a component architecture soon... or at least build bridges between them so they can work together. I think we can provide all the necessary glue to do this (it's going to be glue, because that's just the hacker mentality) but I really think it can happen.
I really think the games will come along when we actually get the other critical parts along. A decent office suite, and a really well-integrated software set. I don't know all that many people who watch DVD's under windows who aren't geeks themselves, so I think that point is moot as well. Honestly, I think the guys at Mandrake, if they pull their heads out of their asses and stop installing 95% of freshmeat by default, could actually make a good user-friendly OS out of Linux. Competing with MS isn't going to happen overnight, it's taken how many years to get the kernel stable enough to realistically compete on the server level? We'll get the desktops in good shape soon enough...
The thing that I wonder about, is how to get people to actually try the damn thing. I mean... it could be the greatest desktop in the world but that doesn't mean anything if they don't see it! I hear wonderful things about Be, and I would love to give it a whirl, but I'm too lazy to install it. How can we get people to try Linux? Furthermore, how can we get them to install it themselves? Advocacy is the biggest issue... most windows people I know use either AOL or Netscape mail, showing that they'll use whatever the local guru sets up for them. The trick is to hide everything important behind a button or menu or text field to make them feel comfy and they'll use it happily, even if it isn't the best.
That's an interesting idea, but I'd think it's more like offsets to allow correct (or incorrect) modification. But, like I said... it's not really like a program because it's got very different limitations than a computer. You can have infinite recursiveness (i.e. infinite memory) which changes the whole game entirely.
Eh... not really. More like it's part of the body of the program. I don't really like the whole "Genome == Computer Program" analogy because in a lot of ways they're very different animals, or at least the way we code is not the same as the way nature codes.
The crap, if it's anything, is more likely something that has a lot of different functions in development, from breaking up functional genes to providing a reservoir for new genes, as well as influencing an organism's development or differentiation.
Remember, if you want to think of the genome as a program, think of it as an infinitely recursive, self-modifying one, and you get to realizing just how unlike any program it is.
The lengthening of the human genome? I don't think it's really lengthening any more than it's shortening (i.e. it's static due to deletions as well as insertions). It's just full of a lot of junk that doesn't get encoded. That may or may not mean anything on the whole, but who knows?
How do you mean "more evolved"? What about the worm with less base pairs? Is it "more evolved"? How so? It's gone through evolution too and still has a smaller genome, but it doesn't have the same advanced array of functions that the human does. How about the fern then? It's been around forever, and it's got a huge genome? It can't do much more than the grass. Basically, what I'm saying is, I think you're full of it and you obviously don't really have a grasp of evolution or genetics.
Nope. Like the article talks about, the genome can just be full of a lot of crap. Also, there can be transpositions (happens all the time in corn to give you multiple kernel colors on the same cobb) that duplicate genes and such. Ferns have a lot of crap. So do humans.
Human coders aren't shitty, they're just not working the same model. Human coders spell out every little detail of their system to get it to work right. The gene doesn't do that. It spells out the code of proteins, but it doesn't really say how they interact. It's tough for me to really explain this, but genes aren't like source code at all. It's kind of like having a bunch of diseparate functions (i.e. each gene) where the actual body of the program writes itself perpetually. Weird, huh?
And even if it is switched on, there's no guarantee it's used in the same way. Say you're coding for an enzyme that oxidizes an amino acid (or some other random bullshit enzyme, I dunno). This is a fairly common thing, oxidation, but where is this enzyme located? In your foot? In your brain? What is the affect of an oxidized amino acid in these two areas? Genetics is not a simple binary system of "on/off, 1/0" but an insanely complex and beautiful system of interconnected parts that work together to make a whole. Simply putting a mouse by a computer doesn't do much, you need to put the plug in the right place. Same with gene expression.
Back door? Why not when there's already a wide open front door? There already are some genes and such that are patented by companies. If you want to do anything with them (like test for them to see if someone's got a rare genetic disease) you can't without paying royalties. They have to do it. I don't know which genes specifically, but we had a guest lecturer come in and talk about it in one of my classes. Scary, huh?
That's very true, but that doesn't mean this can't be used. One thing that is very useful that I'd imagine, is to do experiments on the "junk" (my professors always called it "crap", a far mor elegant term in my opinion). I think that the crap could play a major role in the development of an organism, since the genes are pretty much the same in a lot of organisms (i.e. mouse to human to chimp etc.) but they wind up being very very different animals. It's not just having the genes that counts, it's how they are expressed from the start, and when you look at what's different in those embryos, it's the crap in the genome. Why not start throwing some human genome junk (large repeating sequences with no stop codons would be a good start) in to an egg and see what happens? Bet you it won't be the same old Fugu...
Loki actually did come out with an installer that handles actual game placement, and it works pretty well (in my experience, with Q3 and some demos) but the problem is more along the lines of configuring the OS itself, which is not always easy even in windows. If you've never had a 3D driver break in windows, then you haven't really been using windows very much:-)
I think the real problem, as mentioned in a few of the posts on Quakeworld, was that 3D support was totally lacking for anyone who didn't own a Voodoo. I personally run a Rage Fury, and only within the past 3 weeks with the release of XFree 4 in Debian (thanks Brandon!) and a fair amount of tweaking, do I finally have the ability to run that copy of Q3 I bought for Windows back in November or so. A year later.
So now that the infrastructure is largely in place for a lot of users (nVidia finally got great drivers going too) why not give it a go? It simply wasn't there for most people a year ago, but now id may be able to sell more boxes. Hopefully they'll take this in to account and release a Linux box for Doom III. If they do... I'll buy it. I'm already planning to buy either Tribes 2 or Deus Ex when it's released on Linux.
OpenDoc was sucky. Sorry... I really wanted to like it. I have a bunch of beta CD's sitting at home for it that I haven't looked at in years. It's pretty much been fulfilled in activeX, and now bonobo. The idea was more that you could embed one form of data in another and each component (i.e. app) would handle the data itself. Didn't understand the data? Get the component (duh!).
So why does it suck? Performance. Interface. Sucky, Sucky, Sucky. Not only did the U.I. make no sense whatsoever, but it was slow as hell. No... what we need is more of each app handling a sort of common data format (XML?) and filtering it. Not embedding.
I think extending the UNIX idea of lots of filters to be put together is the most important thing to be done for GUIs. Why would you want Excel to be an email program too, why not just pipe it in to (*choking gagging*) Outlook?
I think what we need to do is to figure out how to make GUI apps interact with pipes well. It was really easy when it was just formatted text, but what about other data? Is XML the answer to this? That's a distinct possibility. I'd like to see some discussion in this area, of using all major GUI apps as filters in a sense. Not a simple re-creation of what we've already got, but of actually facilitating data sharing on a wide scale. Anyone have any thoughts?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Re:Apple's participation in the community
on
No Love For Darwin?
·
· Score: 1
MODERATE THIS UP!!!!! He's hit it right on the head here.
Hey, don't knock Ion Storm if you haven't played Deus Ex yet. I hate Daikatana as much as the next guy (well... except maybe Lowtax) but no way in hell am I going to let you say Ion Storm as a whole sucks with Deus Ex, which is the best game I've seen in a long time, in their lineup. Think before you post flamage, or at least do a little research (like maybe visit the company website).
Slashdot Mirror
Liberty and Freedom doesn't mean that you have the right to force the rest of us to pay for your habits.
So what consitutes this? Where do you draw the line? The problem is that when you start blocking sites, where do you stop? Back in high school (early days of filtering) I had to do a report on Free Speech. I hopped on the net and found a site that looked promising, only to find it had been blocked. It wasn't about porn (it had a link to porn or something) but about the first amendment!
Once you start filtering stuff, how can you really tell what it is that needs filtering? While some kid may be "drooling over the latest Porn Pics", another may be looking up neo-nazi pages for a report on racism. Are you going to tell him he can't look at these sites because they're offensive? Once you start labeling things like this, you get in to a very grey area that really does infringe, not only on free speech, but on the ability of a school or library to do its job effectively.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I agree on this one. It's next to impossible to find a lot of the CD's I look for used, simply because people aren't willing to part with them because they're not just throw-aways. The problem with all the authors who complain is that they sold a lot of books that weren't necessarily keepers to a lot of people who don't care much in the first place. The more you sell, the more likely a copy will end up on the used racks. And they sold a ton.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
This whole thing reminds me of when GNOME came out. All we heard was bitching and whining all around about how it sucked and was buggy, and now that it's a stable project no one seems to have any real problems with it.
I think the same thing will happen with Mozilla. You've got the core supporters (try a nightly! Or v 0.6!) and the bashers (slow, bloated, sucky) but in the end, when it's released, you'll see a lot of people using it happily with no complaints. We bitch because we're seeing a work in progress and comparing it to a fifth generation product but when we get the final product I think we'll be quite content with it. It'll render fast enough and start fast enough and we really won't care in the end because we'll have a good, modern browser. The bitching is just temporary.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think there is the distinct possibility that other countries will outlaw zoning, but that doesn't mean that the US will be the same, regardless of what those other countries do. DVDs and players produced in the US will continue to be zoned, and I'm betting most of the DVD's produced in other countries will be zoned as well, just to squeeze the US consumers more, even if the players themselves play from anywhere.
I'd love to see zoning go away in the US, where it needs to go away most (the home market is the most important market of all) but I just don't think it will. People just don't see how it hurts them because most people aren't even aware that zoning exists.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I dunno... this doesn't mean it'll get passed everywhere. You can bet the movie industry isn't just going to stand by, especially in America where they have serious lobbying power. Sure... we could all order our DVD players from Australia, but Joe "Circuit City" America isn't going to even think about it.
And one of the big ones to think about is the PS2, which I'm betting is going to be the DVD player in most homes all over the globe. They've already got region encoding, and they'll continue to do so in most places. The DVD format isn't going to change, so most people will have their regional encoding nicely in place for the MPAA.
Personally, I'd love to see regional encoding dropped for all future stuff, but somehow, I don't think it'll happen in my backyard. This country is too well run by the rich to change that one.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
- Web Browser
- Word Processor/Office Suite
- Email Client
- Games!
- etc, etc
But only one of each! The thing about Mandrake is that it's the Kitchen Sink approach. How the hell is any newbie supposed to figure out the differences between programs if (s)he can't even find the documentation because it's buried under a heaping pile of obscure apps? The other thing that's needed is a sort of pseudo-dselect (for Debian users out there) that will allow you to select a new app (categorized by type) whenever you want one, and will let you either download the app or install from a CD. Easy and not too complex. It's best not to overwhelm a new user, but to give him a leg up in to the world with a few defaults. If he wants to explore, let him, but don't throw it all out there and expect him to wade through it. You'll just bury them."I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Thank you for this, you really hit it right on the head, in probably the best phrased and most interesting comment I've seen on the subject anywhere.
I think one of the problems is that the paranoia is so hard to penetrate. How do you get through to someone that it's Ok to be a sexual creature? That it's acceptable to have desires and wants? To make it harder... how do you get through to them if they live in Wyoming and you're in California? Porno sure won't do it... it's too absurd to actually present a message. Hollywood hasn't done it, even when characters are honestly sexual in films, it's often labeled as smut. The call "for the children" isn't really a call for the children at all, but for the immature child who lives inside everyone who's scared of their body who never left mental puberty and grew in to themselves. How can you reach a person like that?
I'm really hoping the next sexual revolution comes along soon, because we could use it. From what I understand, the first was in the 20's and it liberated women (sexually at least) then the second was in the 60's (and still continues somewhat) with gays and women. What needs to happen next is a male liberation that doesn't exclude heterosexuals. Or perhaps a stronger women's lib movement that really hits the people who need it. But it's fear of ourselves that puts laws like this out there, and you're definitely right... it's a social form of mental illness.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
So what do we do? Standardize on one thing? A possibility... given that we've standardized on GNU for the most part (BSD folks aside) and the traditional UNIX interface in general, as well as X, so it's not like we can't all rally behind some basics.
:-) So... if we separate the Gnome component library stuff (and bonobo... I really want bonobo...) from all the extra ties, could we make the kind of development environment we need? I think so.
;-) feels so alive! It's what's drawing the attention of journalists and IBM and everyone who cares to take a look. It's like we're holding some secret, that the computer isn't just a productivity tool that's made for stock options and .coms and dividends, but a fun machine that can be "hacked" or programmed without a $500 compiler. The fire in the community is there because it is open, and because it's open there's diversity, and that's why linux has some of the best stuff out there.
But how do you make the unified component library. As near as I can tell, the only one out there is for GNOME, and I really really really don't want to go back to running that thing again. I'm perfectly happy with my minimalist Blackbox, thank you.
But, in the end, what makes this OS great is the heterogeneity of it, that it doesn't all come from the Big Guys at Apple or MS. I really don't want Steve Jobs directing my computing experience any more, and I won't have it. I know I'm not the only one, and that's why there's so little unification, and it's also why the Linux Community (yes, caps
br That said, I think there should be some guidelines set up for certain things... like UI. Set up the equivalent of Mac UI Guidlines, so that all programs look similar and work similar, whether written for KDE, GNOME, or anything else. If someone doesn't follow the guidelines, then patch it for them so it does and send it on in. That's Free Software. Modify. Distribute. Problem solved. I think we'll have to pretty much standardize on a component architecture soon... or at least build bridges between them so they can work together. I think we can provide all the necessary glue to do this (it's going to be glue, because that's just the hacker mentality) but I really think it can happen.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I really think the games will come along when we actually get the other critical parts along. A decent office suite, and a really well-integrated software set. I don't know all that many people who watch DVD's under windows who aren't geeks themselves, so I think that point is moot as well. Honestly, I think the guys at Mandrake, if they pull their heads out of their asses and stop installing 95% of freshmeat by default, could actually make a good user-friendly OS out of Linux. Competing with MS isn't going to happen overnight, it's taken how many years to get the kernel stable enough to realistically compete on the server level? We'll get the desktops in good shape soon enough...
The thing that I wonder about, is how to get people to actually try the damn thing. I mean... it could be the greatest desktop in the world but that doesn't mean anything if they don't see it! I hear wonderful things about Be, and I would love to give it a whirl, but I'm too lazy to install it. How can we get people to try Linux? Furthermore, how can we get them to install it themselves? Advocacy is the biggest issue... most windows people I know use either AOL or Netscape mail, showing that they'll use whatever the local guru sets up for them. The trick is to hide everything important behind a button or menu or text field to make them feel comfy and they'll use it happily, even if it isn't the best.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
That's an interesting idea, but I'd think it's more like offsets to allow correct (or incorrect) modification. But, like I said... it's not really like a program because it's got very different limitations than a computer. You can have infinite recursiveness (i.e. infinite memory) which changes the whole game entirely.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Eh... not really. More like it's part of the body of the program. I don't really like the whole "Genome == Computer Program" analogy because in a lot of ways they're very different animals, or at least the way we code is not the same as the way nature codes.
The crap, if it's anything, is more likely something that has a lot of different functions in development, from breaking up functional genes to providing a reservoir for new genes, as well as influencing an organism's development or differentiation.
Remember, if you want to think of the genome as a program, think of it as an infinitely recursive, self-modifying one, and you get to realizing just how unlike any program it is.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Ok, I'll grant you that, but like you said... we're a few billion years behind the game :-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Telomeres aren't a gene, they're a structure.
The lengthening of the human genome? I don't think it's really lengthening any more than it's shortening (i.e. it's static due to deletions as well as insertions). It's just full of a lot of junk that doesn't get encoded. That may or may not mean anything on the whole, but who knows?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
How do you mean "more evolved"? What about the worm with less base pairs? Is it "more evolved"? How so? It's gone through evolution too and still has a smaller genome, but it doesn't have the same advanced array of functions that the human does. How about the fern then? It's been around forever, and it's got a huge genome? It can't do much more than the grass. Basically, what I'm saying is, I think you're full of it and you obviously don't really have a grasp of evolution or genetics.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Nope. Like the article talks about, the genome can just be full of a lot of crap. Also, there can be transpositions (happens all the time in corn to give you multiple kernel colors on the same cobb) that duplicate genes and such. Ferns have a lot of crap. So do humans.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Human coders aren't shitty, they're just not working the same model. Human coders spell out every little detail of their system to get it to work right. The gene doesn't do that. It spells out the code of proteins, but it doesn't really say how they interact. It's tough for me to really explain this, but genes aren't like source code at all. It's kind of like having a bunch of diseparate functions (i.e. each gene) where the actual body of the program writes itself perpetually. Weird, huh?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
And even if it is switched on, there's no guarantee it's used in the same way. Say you're coding for an enzyme that oxidizes an amino acid (or some other random bullshit enzyme, I dunno). This is a fairly common thing, oxidation, but where is this enzyme located? In your foot? In your brain? What is the affect of an oxidized amino acid in these two areas? Genetics is not a simple binary system of "on/off, 1/0" but an insanely complex and beautiful system of interconnected parts that work together to make a whole. Simply putting a mouse by a computer doesn't do much, you need to put the plug in the right place. Same with gene expression.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Back door? Why not when there's already a wide open front door? There already are some genes and such that are patented by companies. If you want to do anything with them (like test for them to see if someone's got a rare genetic disease) you can't without paying royalties. They have to do it. I don't know which genes specifically, but we had a guest lecturer come in and talk about it in one of my classes. Scary, huh?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
That's very true, but that doesn't mean this can't be used. One thing that is very useful that I'd imagine, is to do experiments on the "junk" (my professors always called it "crap", a far mor elegant term in my opinion). I think that the crap could play a major role in the development of an organism, since the genes are pretty much the same in a lot of organisms (i.e. mouse to human to chimp etc.) but they wind up being very very different animals. It's not just having the genes that counts, it's how they are expressed from the start, and when you look at what's different in those embryos, it's the crap in the genome. Why not start throwing some human genome junk (large repeating sequences with no stop codons would be a good start) in to an egg and see what happens? Bet you it won't be the same old Fugu...
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Loki actually did come out with an installer that handles actual game placement, and it works pretty well (in my experience, with Q3 and some demos) but the problem is more along the lines of configuring the OS itself, which is not always easy even in windows. If you've never had a 3D driver break in windows, then you haven't really been using windows very much :-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think the real problem, as mentioned in a few of the posts on Quakeworld, was that 3D support was totally lacking for anyone who didn't own a Voodoo. I personally run a Rage Fury, and only within the past 3 weeks with the release of XFree 4 in Debian (thanks Brandon!) and a fair amount of tweaking, do I finally have the ability to run that copy of Q3 I bought for Windows back in November or so. A year later.
So now that the infrastructure is largely in place for a lot of users (nVidia finally got great drivers going too) why not give it a go? It simply wasn't there for most people a year ago, but now id may be able to sell more boxes. Hopefully they'll take this in to account and release a Linux box for Doom III. If they do... I'll buy it. I'm already planning to buy either Tribes 2 or Deus Ex when it's released on Linux.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
OpenDoc was sucky. Sorry... I really wanted to like it. I have a bunch of beta CD's sitting at home for it that I haven't looked at in years. It's pretty much been fulfilled in activeX, and now bonobo. The idea was more that you could embed one form of data in another and each component (i.e. app) would handle the data itself. Didn't understand the data? Get the component (duh!).
So why does it suck? Performance. Interface. Sucky, Sucky, Sucky. Not only did the U.I. make no sense whatsoever, but it was slow as hell. No... what we need is more of each app handling a sort of common data format (XML?) and filtering it. Not embedding.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think extending the UNIX idea of lots of filters to be put together is the most important thing to be done for GUIs. Why would you want Excel to be an email program too, why not just pipe it in to (*choking gagging*) Outlook?
I think what we need to do is to figure out how to make GUI apps interact with pipes well. It was really easy when it was just formatted text, but what about other data? Is XML the answer to this? That's a distinct possibility. I'd like to see some discussion in this area, of using all major GUI apps as filters in a sense. Not a simple re-creation of what we've already got, but of actually facilitating data sharing on a wide scale. Anyone have any thoughts?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
MODERATE THIS UP!!!!! He's hit it right on the head here.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Hey, don't knock Ion Storm if you haven't played Deus Ex yet. I hate Daikatana as much as the next guy (well... except maybe Lowtax) but no way in hell am I going to let you say Ion Storm as a whole sucks with Deus Ex, which is the best game I've seen in a long time, in their lineup. Think before you post flamage, or at least do a little research (like maybe visit the company website).
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."